1. Field of the Invention
One or more aspects of the invention generally relate to processing graphics data in a programmable graphics processor, and more particularly to writing and reading graphics data associated with a buffer.
2. Description of the Related Art
Current graphics data processing is exemplified by systems and methods developed to perform a specific operation on several graphics data elements, e.g., linear interpolation, tessellation, texture mapping, depth testing. Traditionally graphics processing systems were implemented as fixed function computation units and more recently the computation units are programmable to perform a limited set of operations. Computation units are connected in a “shading pipeline” to perform shading operations. The shading pipeline includes a texture read interface for reading texture data from graphics memory and a write interface for writing graphics data, including texture data to graphics memory. When the texture data is being written to a buffer stored in graphics memory, the buffer may not be read from by the texture read interface until the shading pipeline has been flushed. The shading pipeline is flushed to assure that any pending writes to the buffer are completed before the texture data is read from the buffer by the shading pipeline. Processing throughput of the shading pipeline is reduced whenever a flush instruction is executed.
For the foregoing reasons, it is desirable to write to a buffer and read from the buffer without flushing the shading pipeline between the write and read.